MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Going to the Movies: The Light Fantastic
I
T's A PLEASURE TO REPORT
that the little surge of beautifully crafted,
offbeat films that made
1999
such a good moviegoing year has been
sustained since last summer, even as Hollywood blockbusters con–
tinue to draw a record audience. There is no single pattern that
describes these small new movies. They range from the fantastic to the
minutely realistic. One of last summer's best films was a brooding super–
natural thriller with Nicole Kidman,
The Others,
set on the island of
Jersey in
1945
and directed in English by a twenty-nine-year-old Span–
ish director, Alejandro Amenabar. Another,
Ghost World,
was based on
an adult comic book by Daniel Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff,
whose previous work was a brilliant documentary about the cartoonist
R. Crumb .
The Others,
seemingly about a mother fiercely protecting her
children, does some ingenious turns on the kind of darkly atmospheric
ghost story that goes back to
The Turn of the Screw, The Shining,
and
The Sixth Sense.
It's hard to imagine that anything more could be done
with a haunted house, an isolated island, vaguely menacing servants,
and vulnerab le children, but
The Others,
powered by superb perfor–
mances by the underrated Kidman and the great Irish actress Fionnula
Flanagan, is more meditative than scary. It is so grounded in mood,
character, and setting that even its trick ending feels satisfying.
Ghost World,
which had no ghosts in sight, was a more daring, less
commercial venture.
It
begins with a tongue-in-cheek version of a high
school graduation, as observed with sardonic amusement by two
friends, Enid (Thora Birch) and Becky (Scarlett Johannson). The girls
are in league against the jocks, extroverts, retards, and pseudo–
bohemians that surround them-against all the staples of the Holly–
wood teen movie. Enid's pathetically belated punk sensibi lity, her dis–
gust with the conventional wor ld around her, carries the movie. With
straight black hair framing her round face and dark-framed glasses that
make her
look
like the cartoon character, En id exudes a bright eighteen–
year-old's worldweariness and irony, as fi ltered through the countercul–
tural sensibi lity of two middle-aging men, Clowes and Zwigoff. Like the
graphic novel on which it is based, the movie is tender toward outcasts
